Jenny Sellman found out firsthand this weekend about the perils of U.S. Highway 59 between Lawrence and Ottawa.

The stretch of road has long been criticized by highway safety experts as one of the deadliest in Kansas.

But Sellman wasn’t tested by the highway’s narrow shoulders, hilly roads or congestion. Instead, the 52-year-old McLouth woman had to contend with a recent phenomenon of the highway: vandals throwing beverage containers at cars traveling the route.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating seven reports of cans or bottles of soda pop or beer being hurled at vehicles traveling on or near U.S. Highway 59. The rash of reports began Thursday.

Sellman said she was heading home just after 11 p.m. Sunday from a trip to Iola with her daughter when someone in a dark-colored pickup truck launched something at the windshield of her Dodge pickup.

“It was just this huge explosion right when I met them,” Sellman said. “My first inkling was that I hit them. It was so loud. We couldn’t see a thing through the windshield. Something was all over it.”

Sellman and her daughter pulled over and found a sticky liquid they thought was soda pop on the windshield. The impact occurred in the 500 section of U.S. Highway 59 and caused about $600 damage to the bug shield and windshield of Sellman’s truck.

Had it not been for recent accidents in the Kansas City area that occurred after people threw items at vehicles from overpasses, Sellman said she probably wouldn’t have reported the “spooky” incident.

Sellman said she was surprised when the officer who took her report said she had already responded to two similar cases and was on her way to another.

“That’s terrible,” Sellman said. “Somebody could really get hurt.”

The most recent incident occurred about 1 a.m. Tuesday on U.S. 59 five miles south of Lawrence. A glass bottle  possibly a beer bottle  struck and shattered the windshield of a vehicle driven by a 26-year-old Lawrence man, Sheriff’s Lt. Kathy Tate said.

The victim was northbound and the object was thrown from a southbound white, midsize truck, Tate said.

About 8 p.m. Thursday, the windshield was shattered on a pickup truck driven by a 19-year-old Overbrook man as he drove westbound on U.S. Highway 56 west of Baldwin. What was thought to be a beer can was thrown from a red mid-1990s Pontiac Grand Am, the sheriff’s report said.

Sheriff’s officers are now investigating a total of seven similar incidents that have occurred along the same highways during the past week. Anyone with information about a suspect is asked to call 843-TIPS.